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Just how much did one of Quebec's most influential figures, TV superstar Julie Snyder, influence Pierre Karl Peladeau’s jump into separatist politics?

Former Quebecor boss Pierre Karl Péladeau and Julie Snyder before their breakup. Snyder is a household name in Quebec, gaining fame as a prolific TV producer and host. (Denis Beaumont / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo)

Television host and producer Julie Snyder in the 2009 Star Académie final, Quebec's version of American Idol. (Paul Chiasson / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo)

Julie Snyder arrives to testify at a legislative committee on health in 2008 in Quebec City. Snyder, five months pregnant, appealed for the province to make assisted fertility affordable. (JACQUES BOISSINOT / Canadian Press)

MONTREAL—In a Quebec that still divides itself into sovereigntist and federalist, the celebrity couple of TV mogul Julie Snyder and media titan Pierre Karl Péladeau were an enigma.

He, the former president of Quebecor, the founder of the French-bashing, Canada-loving Sun News Network, named former Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney godfather to the couple’s first child.

She, the radiant sun in the province’s insular entertainment universe, the prolific reality TV producer, the confidante to Céline Dion, is a student of history, an inveterate networker with a keen sense of political timing.

For a long time the politics of the power couple, who separated last Christmas Eve after 12 years, were masked in TV makeup, hidden behind shell companies. Political donations were evenly split when there were two parties in the Quebec legislature; when there were three parties they were divided in three.

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That studied sheen of neutrality was swept away Sunday morning. Péladeau, 52, announced as a Parti Québécois candidate in the April 7 election, raised his fist, cast party leader Pauline Marois into a long shadow, and declared Quebec’s independence to be among his “most profound and most intimate values.”

It has moved fast from there. Talk has already zipped ahead to Péladeau’s influence on the hypothetical third sovereignty vote. It is dizzying, trying to understand how we got to that point.

Start with the following picture to try and work out the origins of Péladeau’s apparent thirst for independence.

Snyder, now 46, was at a family function several years ago and deep in conversation with Sébastien (Biz) Fréchette, frontman with the popular left-wing, separatist rap trio Loco Locass. After a profound depression in the wake of his first child he was hesitant about a second.

“Julie told me that it is useless to win independence if we didn’t have children,” he told Montreal’s La Presse in 2012. “She told me that just one child wasn’t enough, that I had an obligation to give my first child a brother or sister.”

Both of Péladeau and Snyder’s children — Thomas, 8, and Romy, 5 — were conceived with the costly assistance of doctors and lab technicians. Snyder has been public about her fertility struggle and aware of the injustice. Why should it be that their family has access to in-vitro fertilization or artificial insemination because price is not a barrier while a middle-class mother is deprived?

So she launched a campaign to have the provincial Liberal government pay for the procedures. The government resisted, asking why it should pay for a couple that waits too long to have children.

In June 2008, Snyder — five months pregnant — sat before a commission of legislators in Quebec City. “I am asking you to act . . . in the name of Quebec, which greatly needs more little Quebecers and more little taxpayers,” she said.

Among the commission members was the health minister, Philippe Couillard, now Quebec Liberal leader, and Snyder scolded him for his “hard-headed” position on assisted procreation and for joking with his colleagues during the hearing.

“You look like you’re having a lot of fun, that what we’re saying is funny, that you don’t take us seriously, that you feel we’re crazy . . . it’s weird for use to see you laughing like that with your colleagues on the sly.”

It took two years and Couillard’s temporary leave from politics, but Snyder won. In 2010, Quebec became one of the first jurisdictions in the world to cover the costs of assisted procreation. In 2012, 6,000 couples claimed the services.

After giving birth to two more little Québécois, Snyder has given sovereigntists the father of her children.

By all accounts, Péladeau’s long-rumoured, always-denied coming-out party was expertly directed. On Friday, March 7, Snyder addressed the public on Facebook, breaking a public silence that had endured since she and Péladeau announced their separation via press release on Jan. 10.

“The time has come to return to you because it is now your friendship that I greatly need,” she wrote, attracting some 41,500 “likes” and more than 6,000 comments.

The news that Péladeau would be running in the riding of St-Jérôme, north of Montreal, leaked out late on the Saturday evening. Just ahead of the Sunday morning press conference, Péladeau resigned from the boards of Hydro-Québec, Quebecor Media and TVA Group. But the most remarkable aspect of the press conference was the gratitude he expressed for his ex-wife’s support.

“Without your support, I wouldn’t be here before you this morning,” he told journalists. A report in La Presse this week said Snyder herself had called Marois to bless the bombshell political union.

As for Péladeau’s former union with Snyder, he said at his press conference that they have recently been in counselling.

“I think we’re on the right path to find solutions,” he said. “Political life is too demanding. You have to have a peaceful environment. I have the support of Julie. I have discussed it at length with Julie. Julie gave me her blessing and I am privileged to count on her support.”

So the man who launched Sun TV as the “controversially Canadian” and “unapologetically patriotic” news network, in 2010 is the same man who proclaimed one week ago: “I’ve always been a sovereigntist.”

It hasn’t always been so clear.

Bernard Bujold, for one, saw an “apolitical” soul. The former executive assistant and biographer for Péladeau’s late father, Quebecor founder Pierre Péladeau, said Pierre had an affinity for René Lévesque’s PQ but turned down an offer to run for the party in 1976.

But the son never showed an interest.

“He would ensure he wasn’t in the country on election days,” Bujold wrote in his 2003 book, Pierre Péladeau, the Unknown.

Pierre Karl said he voted for independence in the 1980 referendum. The next time around, in 1995, he was working at Quebecor’s offices in France. Péladeau père, a significant business voice, was sought out to counter federalists like the Bombardier and Desmarais dynasties but always declined, Bujold said in an interview.

“Pierre decided not to do anything politically at this level because he was in business.”

It has been Snyder whose causes seem to dovetail more closely with that of Quebec’s political sovereignty movement. While she is best known for making French-language knock-offs of popular American reality TV shows like La Voix (The Voice), Le Banquier (Deal or No Deal), Occupation Double (Big Brother) and Star Académie (American Idol), she has also backed more ambitious, ideological projects.

The most recent was a documentary of former PQ minister Lise Payette, broadcast last December on Péladeau’s TVA network. Snyder’s production company also produced a biographical film in 2007 about Pierre Bourgault, a founder of the independence movement in the 1960s.

But it was her decision to step on to the stage at an election rally for the current PQ leader in the final days of the 2012 campaign that really caught attention. She steered clear of the party slogans and instead celebrated the impending election of Quebec’s first female premier. She was off the stage before the chants of “We want a country!” broke out again in the crowd. But it was a remarkable appearance.

Did Péladeau catch the political bug from Snyder? Up to this point in his career, the only room he has seemed comfortable working is the boardroom. He is stingy with interviews, content to be cast as a corporate villain, a compulsive micro-manager and ruthless union buster. But a year ago, he resigned as president and chief executive of Quebecor, though he remained on two of their boards. He remains Quebecor’s majority shareholder.

Maybe he had too much time on his hands, but he seemed to be drifting into the role in which we now see him. Asked in a Télé-Québec documentary that aired last fall what financial independence meant to him, he chose a revealing analogy.

“It’s like that of a country. It’s freedom. It’s the ability to take command of your own destiny,” he said. “If you’re reliant on someone else, it’s that person who will make the decisions on your behalf.”

It was around that time that he first approached Marois, telling her he had a desire to serve his province. She would appoint him chairman of the board of Hydro-Québec. He would serve without a salary. Reports emerged that he had been invited to sit in on cabinet meetings, a rarity for any member of an arm’s-length government agency.

The ties grew closer, the overtures began, the rumours emerged, were denied and resurfaced.

Now we have what we have — a shrewd and calculating businessman, a corporate navigator charting his path toward a nation called Quebec. One suspects the ultimate goal involves him leading that country.

“He’s really ambitious, he’s not playing the small game,” said Bujold, his father’s biographer. “He wants to be at the top.

“If he sees a way to find his place in history and be the prime minister or the president of a country, I think that’s the choice he has made. I’m not saying he’ll achieve it, but I’m saying what I think he thinks.”

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